In my book, What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?, I talk about the importance of not only all of us periodically reflecting on our lives from time to time, but for politicians to reflect on their political lives as well. The reason that’s important is because that is the only way we each have in maintaining our personal, and in the case of politicians, their political sense of integrity, which Mitt Romney destroyed when he made his “47 percent” judgment error statement.

Recently, it was revealed it was Scott Prouty who secretly videotaped the controversial comments that Mitt Romney made in Florida in support of his 2012 Republican candidacy for President of the United States. Admittance to this gala fundraising event was contributing $50,000 to the Republican party.

Scott Prouty was the bartender for Romney’s event. He shared his videotape with Mother Jones and the magazine published it in September, 2012. Some political pundits felt the videotape showed how out of touch Romney was with average Americans. They felt that after Mother Jones published Romney’s infamous fundraising dinner videotape, he remained defensive from that time until the end of the election. Like the political pundits, I too believed the video helped win President Obama’s re-election.
Quoting part of Romney’s verbatim transcript with you: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what…. Because they are people “who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what….These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. …And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

When Romney was questioned about his infamous remarks he said: “Yes, it was a very unfortunate statement that I made. It’s not what I meant. I didn’t express myself as I wished I would have. You know, when you speak in private, you don’t spend as much time thinking about how something could be twisted and distorted and—and it could come out wrong and be used. But, you know, I did. And it was very harmful. What I said is not what I believe. (italics mine) Obviously, my whole campaign—my whole life has been devoted to helping people, all of the people. I care about all the people of the country. But that hurt. There’s no question that hurt and did real damage to my campaign.”

Romney’s effort to twist things in a way that will change his 47 percent video (See my italics above, 3rd paragraph) to sound more acceptable and in keeping with the kind of political figure he’d like others to view him as being will never happen, because whether he claims what he said was a “Freudian slip” of the tongue, and a long slip it indeed was, or not, he can’t retract what he said by saying what he said he didn’t mean, because if he didn’t mean it he wouldn’t have said it.

In another interview, Romney said, “I don’t want to spend time looking back, I want to move on” Perhaps he should have taken more time to reflect on his life before moving on to make the video that caused so much controversy, since, if he had done so, perhaps he wouldn’t have made that “47 percent” mistake that was one of the principle reasons he lost the election in his bid to become President of the United States.